BANGALORE: Startups hungry for talent are turning to their own kind and hiring those who have tried their hand at entrepreneurship and failed.

These ventures are picking people who may have failed to build their own ventures but have an intimate understanding of what it takes to do so, a trait that is now being valued very highly.

"The single most important distinguishing trait of entrepreneurs is that they make things happen, they will do whatever it takes - nothing is too inferior or infra dig," said TN Hari, the director of human resources at taxi services aggregator, TaxiForSure. The company has hired about 10 former entrepreneurs and is looking to add another five.

"Start-ups need these type of individuals especially those which aim for the big audacious goals," he said. Most of those hired have been taken in as experts in operations and marketing. But there is one common expectation - they all have to be entrepreneurial.

Experts said this trend has the potential to bring in positive change across India's booming startup space where at least two new ventures are set up every day. Of these barely one out of 10 make it big while the rest fall by the wayside, creating pools of entrepreneurs who struggle to deal with failure.

"In the past, the only companies keen on hiring a failed entrepreneur would be in the consulting, public relations, marketing and advertising space. However, now startups in various sectors are looking for former or failed entrepreneurs," said Aditya Narayan Mishra, president of staffing firm Randstad India.

Cloud telephony provider Knowlarity with a head count of about 300 people said at least 50 have failed ventures on their resume. The Gurgaon-based company was started by Ambarish Gupta, who himself failed at his first attempt of starting an online real estate brokerage firm called Inventica. The company did not survive for even two years. Gupta ran out of all his savings of $40,000 that he earned from his job in US.

"The company failed but taught me valuable lessons," said Gupta who has now hired people who ran ventures in the internet, services, logistics and technology products. "Failures teach you a lot. However, it takes a lot of energy to start a company and even if someone has failed in doing so, he comes with a lot of knowledge, passion and self-drive," he said.

Hiring a failed entrepreneur is mostly a mutually beneficial equation. The ex-entrepreneur understands typical startup issues, and the founders give them the opportunity to establish themselves once more.

"It's only about joining someone else's dream and making it your own," TaxiForSure's Hari said.

Delhi-based Tapas Dwivedi, 28, BITS Bilani graduate, who co-founded a social movie-discovery engine called dapple.in, had to look for a job after the website failed to turn in enough money for him to survive even after 14 months of operations. He met Knowlarity seven months back and decided to join their marketing team.

"I always wanted to work on user and conversion-centred design and Knowlarity seemed to be just the right fit, with its smashing marketing team, an exciting list of clientele and users to create products for, and immense opportunity for self-growth," he said. Gupta has created a format within Knowlarity where groups of people mostly former entrepreneurs, who work across different departments and figure out what needs to be done. "The group is an extension of me. In a growth phase, you need people who can do things without being told what to do," he said.

"With new-age companies looking for people who can think out of the box, failed entrepreneur will be in demand," said Randstad's Mishra.